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Friday, May 19, 2017

Free speech is so last century.

Something I have witnessed first hand on college campuses and in
everyday conversation. We gave it up of our own choice...and now
students see it as an attack on them...This is from Spectrum... -Art Lynch

Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere. On campuses
across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously
policing beer-fuelled banter in the uni bar. They look like students,
dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have
been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to
conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average
book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone
who’s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these
students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening
it up.

I was attacked by a swarm of Stepford students this
week. On Tuesday, I was supposed to take part in a debate about abortion
at Christ Church, Oxford. I was invited by the Oxford Students for Life
to put the pro-choice argument against the journalist Timothy Stanley,
who is pro-life. But apparently it is forbidden for men to talk about
abortion. A mob of furious feministic Oxford students, all robotically
uttering the same stuff about feeling offended, set up a Facebook page
littered with expletives and demands for the debate to be called off.
They said it was outrageous that two human beings ‘who do not have
uteruses’ should get to hold forth on abortion — identity politics at
its most basely biological — and claimed the debate would threaten the
‘mental safety’ of Oxford students. Three hundred promised to turn up to
the debate with ‘instruments’ — heaven knows what — that would allow
them to disrupt proceedings.

Incredibly, Christ Church
capitulated, the college’s censors living up to the modern meaning of
their name by announcing that they would refuse to host the debate on
the basis that it now raised ‘security and welfare issues’. So at one of
the highest seats of learning on Earth, the democratic principle of
free and open debate, of allowing differing opinions to slog it out in
full view of discerning citizens, has been violated, and students have
been rebranded as fragile creatures, overgrown children who need to be
guarded against any idea that might prick their souls or challenge their
prejudices. One of the censorious students actually boasted about her
role in shutting down the debate, wearing her intolerance like a badge
of honour in an Independent article in which she argued that, ‘The idea
that in a free society absolutely everything should be open to debate
has a detrimental effect on marginalised groups.’

This isn’t
the first time I’ve encountered the Stepford students. Last month, at
Britain’s other famously prestigious university, Cambridge, I was
circled by Stepfords after taking part in a debate on faith schools. It
wasn’t my defence of parents’ rights to send their children to religious
schools they wanted to harangue me for — much as they loathed that
liberal position — it was my suggestion, made in this magazine and
elsewhere, that ‘lad culture’ doesn’t turn men into rapists. Their
mechanical minds seemed incapable of computing that someone would say
such a thing.

Their eyes glazed with moral certainty, they
explained to me at length that culture warps minds and shapes behaviour
and that is why it is right for students to strive to keep such wicked,
misogynistic stuff as the Sun newspaper and sexist pop music off campus.
‘We have the right to feel comfortable,’ they all said, like a mantra.
One — a bloke — said that the compulsory sexual consent classes recently
introduced for freshers at Cambridge, to teach what is and what isn’t
rape, were a great idea because they might weed out ‘pre-rapists’: men
who haven’t raped anyone but might. The others nodded. I couldn’t
believe what I was hearing. Pre-rapists! Had any of them read Philip K.
Dick’s dystopian novella about a wicked world that hunts down and
punishes pre-criminals, I asked? None had.

Inline sub2

When I told them that at the fag-end of the last millennium I had spent
my student days arguing against the very ideas they were now spouting —
against the claim that gangsta rap turned black men into murderers or
that Tarantino flicks made teens go wild and criminal — not so much as a
flicker of reflection crossed their faces. ‘Back then, the people who
were making those censorious, misanthropic arguments about culture
determining behaviour weren’t youngsters like you,’ I said. ‘They were
older, more conservative people, with blue rinses.’ A moment’s silence.
Then one of the Stepfords piped up. ‘Maybe those people were right,’ he
said. My mind filled with a vision of Mary Whitehouse cackling to
herself in some corner of the cosmos.

If your go-to image of a
student is someone who’s free-spirited and open-minded, who loves having
a pop at orthodoxies, then you urgently need to update your mind’s
picture bank. Students are now pretty much the opposite of that. It’s
hard to think of any other section of society that has undergone as epic
a transformation as students have. From freewheelin’ to ban-happy, from
askers of awkward questions to suppressors of offensive speech, in the
space of a generation. My showdown with the debate-banning Stepfords at
Oxford and the pre-crime promoters at Cambridge echoed other recent
run-ins I’ve had with the intolerant students of the 21st century. I’ve
been jeered at by students at the University of Cork for criticising gay
marriage; cornered and branded a ‘denier’ by students at University
College London for suggesting industrial development in Africa should
take precedence over combating climate change; lambasted by students at
Cambridge (again) for saying it’s bad to boycott Israeli goods. In each
case, it wasn’t the fact the students disagreed with me that I found
alarming — disagreement is great! — it was that they were so plainly
shocked that I could have uttered such things, that I had failed to
conform to what they assume to be right, that I had sought to
contaminate their campuses and their fragile grey matter with offensive
ideas.

Where once students might have allowed their eyes and
ears to be bombarded by everything from risqué political propaganda to
raunchy rock, now they insulate themselves from anything that might dent
their self-esteem and, crime of crimes, make them feel ‘uncomfortable’.
Student groups insist that online articles should have ‘trigger
warnings’ in case their subject matter might cause offence.

The
‘no platform’ policy of various student unions is forever being
expanded to keep off campus pretty much anyone whose views don’t chime
perfectly with the prevailing groupthink. Where once it was only
far-right rabble-rousers who were no-platformed, now everyone from
Zionists to feminists who hold the wrong opinions on transgender issues
to ‘rape deniers’ (anyone who questions the idea that modern Britain is
in the grip of a ‘rape culture’) has found themselves shunned from the
uni-sphere. My Oxford experience suggests pro-life societies could be
next. In September the students’ union at Dundee banned the Society for
the Protection of Unborn Children from the freshers’ fair on the basis
that its campaign material is ‘highly offensive’.

Barely a week
goes by without reports of something ‘offensive’ being banned by
students. Robin Thicke’s rude pop ditty ‘Blurred Lines’ has been banned
in more than 20 universities. Student officials at Balliol College,
Oxford, justified their ban as a means of ‘prioritising the wellbeing of
our students’. Apparently a three-minute pop song can harm students’
health. More than 30 student unions have banned the Sun, on the basis
that Page Three could turn all those pre-rapists into actual rapists.
Radical feminist students once burned their bras — now they insist that
models put bras on. The union at UCL banned the Nietzsche Society on the
grounds that its existence threatened ‘the safety of the UCL student
body’.

Stepford concerns are over-amplified on social media. No
sooner is a contentious subject raised than a university ‘campaign’
group appears on Facebook, or a hashtag on Twitter, demanding that the
debate is shut down. Technology means that it has never been easier to
whip up a false sense of mass outrage — and target that synthetic anger
at those in charge. The authorities on the receiving end feel so
besieged that they succumb to the demands and threats.

Heaven
help any student who doesn’t bow before the Stepford mentality. The
students’ union at Edinburgh recently passed a motion to ‘End lad
banter’ on campus. Laddish students are being forced to recant their
bantering ways. Last month, the rugby club at the London School of
Economics was disbanded for a year after its members handed out leaflets
advising rugby lads to avoid ‘mingers’ (ugly girls) and ‘homosexual
debauchery’. Under pressure from LSE bigwigs, the club publicly recanted
its ‘inexcusably offensive’ behaviour and declared that its members
have ‘a lot to learn about the pernicious effects of banter’. They’re
being made to take part in equality and diversity training. At British
unis in 2014, you don’t just get education — you also get re-education,
Soviet style.

The censoriousness has reached its nadir in the
rise of the ‘safe space’ policy. Loads of student unions have colonised
vast swaths of their campuses and declared them ‘safe spaces’ — that is,
places where no student should ever be made to feel threatened,
unwelcome or belittled, whether by banter, bad thinking or ‘Blurred
Lines’. Safety from physical assault is one thing — but safety from
words, ideas, Zionists, lads, pop music, Nietzsche? We seem to have
nurtured a new generation that believes its self-esteem is more
important than everyone else’s liberty.

This is what those
censorious Cambridgers meant when they kept saying they have the ‘right
to be comfortable’. They weren’t talking about the freedom to lay down
on a chaise longue — they meant the right never to be challenged by
disturbing ideas or mind-battered by offensiveness. At precisely the
time they should be leaping brain-first into the rough and tumble of
grown-up, testy discussion, students are cushioning themselves from
anything that has the whiff of controversy. We’re witnessing the victory
of political correctness by stealth. As the annoying ‘PC gone mad!’
brigade banged on and on about extreme instances of PC — schools banning
‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’, etc. — nobody seems to have noticed that the
key tenets of PC, from the desire to destroy offensive lingo to the urge
to re-educate apparently corrupted minds, have been swallowed whole by a
new generation. This is a disaster, for it means our universities are
becoming breeding grounds of dogmatism. As John Stuart Mill said, if we
don’t allow our opinion to be ‘fully, frequently, and fearlessly
discussed’, then that opinion will be ‘held as a dead dogma, not a
living truth’.

One day, these Stepford students, with their
lust to ban, their war on offensive lingo, and their terrifying talk of
pre-crime, will be running the country. And then it won’t only be those
of us who occasionally have cause to visit a campus who have to suffer
their dead dogmas.

This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated 22 November 2014

About Me

Actor, Casting Director, Director, Broadcaster, Writer, Singer, Artistic
Director, Dramatur, Producer, Professor, Coach, Husband, Grandfather, Marketing
Professional and life long student Art Lynch joined the staff of John Robert
Powers in 1999. Lynch is also an adjunct professor at the Community College of
Southern Nevada, the Morning Edition Weekend Host for Nevada Public Radio and
one of 67 individuals who represent 126,000 actors as a member of the Board of
Directors of the Screen Actors Guild. He is the past president of the Nevada
Branch of the Screen Actors Guild and of the Professional Audio/Visual Communications
Association. A resident of Nevada since 1984, Lynch has an MA in Communications
from UNLV and a BA in Theater, Speech and Mass Communications from the
University of Illinois, Chicago. He is currently pursuing post-graduate studies
in theater, education and the entertainment industry. Art Lynch studied and
practiced the craft of acting in Chicago and California before settling in
Nevada. With his wife Laura, Art owned and operated a successful marketing
company with national clientele. Art was personally responsible for casting and
directing over 1,000 commercials and industrials, as well as assisting on film
and television projects in many ways. His career also includes earning awards
as a wire service, magazine and broadcast journalist. He is most proud,
however, of his daughters. Ann is a PhD in neuroscience and Beth is the proud
mother of his grandchildren, Evan and Elijah.

Short Film Festival

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